ElevenLabs free-plan music: the ElevenMusic credit rule for ads

On the free ElevenLabs plan you may use a generated track commercially only if you credit ElevenMusic, according to the Music v2.5 announcement, though the music page says free is non-commercial, so confirm before relying on it. Pro subscribers get commercial rights with the subscription, and the permissions in force when a track is created stay with that track. For a paid video ad the credit line is the catch: an ad unit rarely has room for it, so most advertisers pick a paid plan first.

What the vendor pages say

The Music v2.5 post states the free-plan condition and the stay-with-the-track rule. The music page adds that self-serve plans allow online and offline commercial use except for film, TV and Studio Games, while enterprise plans allow all online and offline commercial use. The same page describes the free tier as personal, non-commercial use only, which sits awkwardly beside the blog's credit rule. The API docs page describes music as cleared for nearly all commercial uses including advertisements and sends you to the terms for plan details. Those statements are not identical, and the free-plan conflict is the thing to settle with ElevenLabs in writing before any paid ad uses a free-plan track.

Where the credit line can live

Short-form platforms give you a description field. A broadcast or CTV spot gives you nothing. If you want the free plan for a test cut, keep the credit in the post copy, keep the same text in your asset log, and swap the track before the version that gets media spend behind it.

Sume does not need a credit line to render a track, but that is a statement about the product surface, not a legal grant. A Sume Music job returns an audio artifact on media.sume.com, and Music 1.0 prices each accepted generation at a fixed $0.125. Check the terms that apply to your Sume account for what you may do with it.

Swapping a track without re-editing

If you start on a free track and later move to a paid one, you only need to replace the audio URL, not rebuild the edit. A Timeline 1.0 render takes a soundtrack bed with its own url, gain_db, loop and fade_out_seconds, so the swap is one field in the document. Rendering costs $0.10 per output minute rounded up, and you can call the unbilled plan endpoint first.

• Log which plan made each track and the date.
• Keep the credit text next to every free-plan file.
• Treat "film and TV" as a separate question from social ads.